


Everywhere

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Series: Author's Favorites [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, jim pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-11
Updated: 2010-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-09 22:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10423272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: The thing about living is, you can't be nowhere.  People always joke, saying, "This piss town's in the middle'o nowhere.  Ain't fuck to do here, ain't fuck to look forward to.  Ain't none of us goin' nowhere, here."  Jim's heard all of that before, in a thousand and one variations.  Growing up in Iowa, where there still exist backroads where the dust can fly into the air behind a boy in a classic car, there are a lot of "nowhere towns."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written 3/11/10. Elite of the Fleet challenge fic, never posted anywhere else.

The thing about living is, you can't be nowhere.  People always joke, saying, "This piss town's in the middle'o nowhere.  Ain't fuck to do here, ain't fuck to look forward to.  Ain't none of us goin' nowhere, here."  Jim's heard all of that before, in a thousand and one variations.  Growing up in Iowa, where there still exist backroads where the dust can fly into the air behind a boy in a classic car, there are a lot of "nowhere towns."

Or, at least, there are a lot of what people call "nowhere towns."  A lot of what Jim himself had called nowhere towns, that produce nowhere men and women.  After Sam left, Jim had been convinced that he was going to become one of them.

One of the men who sat at the bar, every night of the week just the same as any other. Nowhere else to be when you're nowhere to begin with.

That was before Jim was Starfleet, before he had someone to _be_ and somewhere to _see_.  Somewhere, Jim can recognize at first glance.  Somewhere is a place completely unlike "nowhere;" a place where things can change, begin, end--

\--die.  You can't die in nowhere, just like you can't live in nowhere.  When you're nowhere, you're doing something else altogether.  Jim can't describe it, because there aren't words, outside of that nowhere; there are only impressions.  Those impressions look like half-lit barrooms, worn-down houses, weather-blown faces, and the old man Jim knew who sat on his porch in an old rocking chair, simply staring off onto the horizon line, as though, beyond that point, _somewhere_ lay.

Now that he's somewhere, Jim knows that he could never return to being nowhere.  And maybe the analysts and psychologists would say that nowhere is just a state of mind -- that each person decides, for him- or herself, what the future holds.  But until someone else told Jim that he could open that door from nowhere to somewhere, Jim had never known he could take that step.  Those words had never meant the same thing, coming from someone who resided in nowhere.

They'd had to come from somewhere, in order for Jim to step over, to be there.

The thing about living is, you can't be nowhere.  But when you die, you aren't nowhere, either.  That's something Jim's decided only recently, when he's had the time -- and the reason -- to contemplate death, and where a person might go, when they die.  He refused to believe that a person went nowhere, because he'd come from nowhere, and it just--

\--hurt too much, to think of anyone going there, simply because they'd left this life.  So he'd reevaluated.  Jim's not a religious man -- maybe, he thinks, he might have been, but maybe not -- and so he didn't have that concept to fall back on.  Instead, he'd come up with one of his own.  Instead, Jim's decided, when you die, you go everywhere.

Not nowhere, because he's seen that, and that isn't it.  Not somewhere, because this is somewhere, and if the dead were here, well, he'd be grateful, but it wouldn't be right, and it wouldn't be natural, and Jim can admit that to himself.  The only thing left, then, is everywhere.

When Jim shares this theory with Bones, over a good draft a bourbon and what would have been, were either of them good Christian boys, a prayer for the recently deceased, Bones gives him a biting, Southern toast.

"One of these days, Jim, I'm filin' that request for shorter periods of grievance inactivity.  The crew just gets down, and you?"  Bones lifts his bourbon in a grave salute before he finishes, "You just get to thinkin'.  I'm sure we can find you a more useful employment, or at least one better for your health."


End file.
